Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

                  Tuesday, April 17, 2001, 4:10pm 
                Room 118 Physics-Astronomy Building
                Refreshments at 3:45 pm in Room 224

           Experimental Science at the Extremes: Scaling  
       Astrophysics into the Laboratory Using Intense Lasers

                         Bruce A. Remington
              Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Modern laser facilities offer new opportunities for pursuing experimental
science at the extremes.  Compared to other areas of science, the field 
of high energy density physics, emerging as a result of high power lasers,
is still in its infancy.  Only a handful of lasers around the world are 
operated as user facilities. Yet in the short time that such a capability
has been available, a user community has nucleated, and new regimes of 
experimental science are emerging.  I will review a selection of science 
highlights that serve to illustrate the potential of this new field.  
Examples of experiments done to probe the dynamics of core-collapse 
supernovae, high Mach number protostellar jets, radiatively driven 
molecular clouds, the interiors of the giant planets, and possibly 
relativistic plasmas relevant to gamma-ray bursts, will be given. 
Scaling - where it works and why - will also be discussed.